


My Heart Reconciled

by altschmerzes



Series: Whumptober 2020 [2]
Category: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Major Character Injury, Missing Scene, Softie Joel (The Last of Us), Trauma, Whump, Whumptober 2020, Winter, aftermath of kidnapping, i am so upset about ellie's cold little hands please get this girl some MITTENS, referenced past child death (sarah)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26784001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altschmerzes/pseuds/altschmerzes
Summary: In the aftermath of rescuing Ellie from David, both she and Joel are in bad shape. Unable to do much except drift in and out of sleep as he recovers from the damage he did to himself by taking off to find her the instant he woke up, Joel watches Ellie push herself until she breaks. And then catches her when she does.(Written for Whumptober 2020 day 2: kidnapped.)
Relationships: Ellie & Joel (The Last of Us)
Series: Whumptober 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1964482
Comments: 14
Kudos: 84
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	My Heart Reconciled

**Author's Note:**

> she's so little and she's got no mittens..... PLEASE....
> 
> anyways please enjoy my post-kidnapping Both Ellie And Joel Are Traumatized And Hurt content ft. headcanon that joel is definitely a johnny cash guy. thanks for reading!

> _My heart reconciled_   
>  _All the darkness and light_   
>  _Inside my chest_   
>  _As her hands held tight_   
>  _And her eyes met mine_   
>  _I saw the future unfold in silver and gold_   
>  _And I’m already proud_
> 
> _\- Sleeping at Last, "Atlas: Life"_

The world has gone empty and cold and quiet. Winter’s iron grip tightens by the day over the landscape and it feels to Joel like it’s got its claws in him just as deep as it does the sky and ground outside. He and Ellie have dragged themselves as far and fast as they could get, the remnants of David and his… associates left behind them in a haze of evil and snow. The house they land in is one of those isolated places people used to live when there was a civilization to want to get away from, now a shell left standing up out of the countryside like the bleached ribcage of a beached whale, long-since dead where it washed up somewhere it was never supposed to be.

Settling into the house, Joel and Ellie make as much of a home there as possible under the circumstances. Or, more accurately, Ellie makes them a home there. For Joel’s part, he’s confined without a choice in the matter to the bed he collapses into when they first make it inside the house. It turns out tearing off on a rescue mission the instant you wake up from an extremely severe, quite nearly fatal injury is not exactly helpful to the healing process, and it’s set him back far enough he feels almost as bad as he had the day he fell on that pipe in the first place.

Immediately when they reach the house, on that first day there after the rescue, Ellie doesn’t really talk. She hunches over with a determined focus, biting her lip and concentrating hard, and one by one redoes the stitches Joel ripped out when he’d gone off after her, and she doesn’t even grumble as she does it, which serves as a major signal that something is wrong. (As if Joel needs a signal to tell that, given the way he’d found her. Where he’d found her, and who’d had her when he did. As if there is anything about this situation that isn’t wrong.)

When she brushes against his bare skin tying off the last of the strips of thread that now bind the wound together, it makes Joel’s entire body flinch. Ellie’s hands are cold, they’re _so_ cold, and feeling their temperature, seeing the reddened hue to her fingers telltale of frostbite, it makes Joel feel like he’s been impaled all over again. It’s a shriekingly painful feeling, helpless and useless and like he’s failed her.

Ellie finishes the stitches and sets the needle down, wrapping the whole kit of supplies in a hand towel she must have gotten from the bathroom. She completes the job by carefully taping a square of gauze over her hard work, smoothing down the off-white strips of adhesive material with her cold little fingers. Joel catches her hands when she goes to get up, stoping her in her tracks. They’re nearly completely hidden where he holds them between his, trying to bring some life back to them - not that Joel’s own hands are much warmer. 

Hunched forward with a tremble in her tightly pursed mouth and a pinched frown worn far too deep into her child’s face, Ellie tolerates this for a moment. Then she yanks abruptly away from him, snatching her hands out of Joel’s, pushing to her feet, and stalking away from the bed. She stops in the doorway, turned around looking at him like she’s about to say something, shoulders heaving in harsh but shallow breaths, and Joel sees it in a moment of lightning clarity. 

It’s there in the way Ellie is moving, hunching around her right side like she’s guarding it, limping but trying to hide it. It’s in the disoriented haze in her eyes when she doesn’t have a direct action item to focus on that needs doing and needs doing _now,_ something to snare her attention and keep it locked in place lest it drift in a way Joel recognizes but doesn’t know the name of. And her hands. Her small, cold, frostbitten hands. Ellie is hurt, in more ways than one.

Joel tries to get something out of his mouth and across the room to her, to say something, _anything,_ but it feels like his lungs are frozen over. It’s like they’re crusted with the same sheets of ice ferned over the windows behind the moth-bitten lace curtains of what used to be the master bedroom of this distant, now-gutted little home, and he can’t get his breath in deep enough to speak. By the time he pulls it together enough to try, breath ghosting out of his mouth in some barely audible, pathetic sound that might once have been intended to be a word, she’s gone. Ellie has disappeared from the doorway, footsteps echoing down the hall, and that’s the last thing Joel hears before he’s suddenly too worn through to stay awake even a moment longer.

Hazing in and out of reality, unaware of what sort of time is passing between one moment of dragging lead-heavy eyelids open and the next, Joel possesses just enough awareness of what’s happening around him to note that every time he’s awake, Ellie is too. From the word ‘go’ she’s on her feet, moving from one task to the next, taking care of the hundred little things that keep life sustained when you’re holed up in what was someone’s home once upon another lifetime, trapped there by a massive injury that should by all accounts have killed you. Ellie is in and out of Joel’s room constantly, sometimes with things to do and sometimes just flicking aside the curtains at the window and looking outside. 

There are plenty of other ways to check what’s happening on that side of the house but even when he has the energy to speak, Joel doesn’t point this out. He gets the feeling that if he tried, it would just make her leave. 

Even when Ellie does leave, she never leaves for long and she always comes back, never out of Joel’s sight for more than a few minutes at a time. Not once has Joel woken and found her not in his room.

As his strength builds, Ellie brings in soups she’s made over an honest to God woodstove in the outer part of the house, and heated water with wild mint from the overgrown yard that she calls ‘fuck it apocalypse tea’. This makes Joel laugh in an empty huff of breath and he can see the secret little twitch of Ellie’s face that means she’s smiling too, pleased that she’s managed to make him laugh but not wanting him to know it. The tea isn’t that great, but Joel never lets a hint of this show on his face, and he drinks every drop.

It seems that as Joel gets better, he watches Ellie get progressively worse. She goes and goes and goes until he can see her flagging, her steps slowing and the grimaces and flinches of pain on her face less and less hidden. It’s clear that, despite how hard she keeps pushing, refusing to slow down, she’s not going to have much of a choice pretty soon. Joel wonders is this is somehow the pact they’ve made, accidentally and without directly acknowledging it - that they will collapse in turns, a see-saw toppling back and forth.

As soon as Joel has the thought, he hates it. This isn’t the world Ellie deserves, and he isn’t the person she deserves, but, well. If there had ever been the faintest suggestion in his mind that life was ever going to be fair, it died with Sarah. Joel isn’t what Ellie deserves but he’s all she has, and he has to step up and do better, so he focuses on recovering, getting himself back to at least the equilibrium he’d reached when he’d been able to drag himself to his feet and out the door to find her.

It’s slow going, but he makes it. The day Joel is finally able to make a water run on his own, down a hill to a clear, clean well at the far end of the property, is the day it happens. He comes back to the house with slow, stiff steps, big plastic jugs crinkling against each other in the backpack he has hefted over his shoulder, ignoring the pull and complaint from the injury that seems to be healing at a sloth’s pace, and there she is on the floor. 

The backpack slips off Joel’s shoulder and crashes to the floor. He doesn’t even think about whether any of the jugs might have split when he drops it. There’s only one thing in his world that matters any more, and this right here, this feels worse than being stabbed.

By the time he makes it to his knees next to her, Ellie is stirring again already, which is enough of a relief that it feels like Joel’s heart had been stopped dead in his chest and then allowed to begin beating again. She looks confused and embarrassed, blinking around from where she’d fallen in a crumpled little heap on the floor, but she doesn’t fight him on it when he gets his arms under her to pick her up. 

An old reminder about lifting with your knees not with your back flits through Joel’s mind as he stands slowly, pulling her carefully to his chest as he goes. He doesn’t even really need to ignore the screaming of the wound this time when he does so, because it barely even registers at the back of his mind. It’s as if, with the too-small weight of this kid in his arms, Joel’s body falls away like it doesn’t exist, the way he’s trained himself to force for moments exactly like this one.

While Joel carries her into the room he’s been holed up in for what feels now like ages, Ellie doesn’t complain or insult him or even pout the way he’s come to expect her to with all the fond exasperation of having a teenage girl in your life. She’s unnervingly quiet and still in his arms and her face is hidden, tucked away into the side of his neck. When he settles her down on the mattress, he does so as gently and delicately as possible, as if she’s made of glass or maybe of ice, thin as the layer that formed over the surface of the well when he’d lowered the bucket down into it, already freezing over despite Ellie having gone out to it just the day before.

(She’d taken longer and longer each time, coming back tired and drawn looking, pale and shivering and with those small, frozen hands clutched determinedly around the handles of the water jugs. That’s why Joel had insisted on going this time and all of a sudden he sees it, the after-image what-if of what had almost happened today. The longest Ellie is ever gone from his sight is when she goes out to the well, and it could’ve happened so easily, she could have fallen somewhere between the well and this abandoned, orphaned house. He can see her there, left curled on her side in the snow, hair frosting over and lips turning bluer and bluer while Joel sat at the house waiting for her none the wiser until it was already too late.)

It makes Joel’s breath catch in his throat, a choking near-escape horror that he knows far too well in this new, coin-toss world, and he pulls the blanket up high to her chin, tucking it around thin shoulders. Still, Ellie doesn’t say anything, doesn’t tell him to fuck off or insist she’s fine and throw the blanket off or anything he’s come to know to expect from her. That more than anything scares Joel - it’s a sign clear and bright as neon that something is wrong in a way that he doesn’t have the first idea how to make right again.

“Ellie,” he says, voice rough and gravel. It grates out in a fashion that reminds him of riding bikes with Tommy when they were young, when the chain would get stuck between gears and rattle out a warning that something’s about to go wrong.

Nothing else comes out after that and so her name hangs between them, Joel hovering awkwardly, Ellie curled on her side with her face ducked down into the pillow. Only a third or so of it is visible, and it takes him a moment to notice that she’s started to shake, and not in the kind of way that means she’s cold. 

So this is the situation as it now stands: Ellie, just minutes out from having finally succumbed to a combination of injury and exhaustion and briefly passed out on the floor, has now buried her face into a pillow and started to cry, and Joel doesn’t have the first idea what he’s supposed to do now. He’s been out of practice so long it felt for a while like his heart had gone dormant in his chest, and now that it’s waking up, it hurts, the way a muscle that hasn’t been used in so long it’s grown stiff and atrophied. It’s been so long it’s like he’s almost forgotten how to have a heart at all, at least one that’s more than just scar tissue.

Some things though, Joel realizes in a moment of calm clarity, you don’t forget how to do, and one of those things is having a daughter. And so this is when he admits it to himself, out loud at least within his own brain, that this is what’s happened here. This is what’s come of this girl and this transport assignment he’d gotten what feels now like a lifetime ago. If he were to be honest with himself, Joel would say he probably _knew_ in that moment after he found her, after David, that moment of getting her wrapped in his arms and never wanting to let go because it was the only place he was sure she’d be completely safe. 

When he tentatively reaches out, muscle memory floods back from where it had been in hibernation, buried deep but never gone. Ellie’s head looks so small and fragile under Joel’s big, rough hand when he lightly strokes over her hair, and it just makes her cry harder. 

With labored, ginger movements, Joel lowers himself onto the floor beside the bed and starts humming under his breath, ignoring the ache in his stomach. His free hand, the one not busy with far more important things, touches his shirt over the spot absently, and it comes away dry - by some kind of miracle, he hasn’t ripped a stitch or otherwise reopened anything that could start bleeding enough to require immediate attention.

Not that Joel’s really sure he would’ve acted if it had. Bleeding seems a small matter next to the way his girl is crying right now, like her heart is breaking and it’s breaking his in turn.

Stretching his legs out in front of him, propping his elbow on the corner of the mattress and continuing to slowly and carefully set the mess that’s Ellie’s hair to rights, Joel hums on and off. Johnny Cash swaps in and out around Frank Sinatra, and he knows she’d make fun of him for that second one if she could pick out any of the tunes. 

(Sarah always did. _No offense, daddy,_ she’d say, eyebrow raised with a fond teasing tone she’d copied straight out of his voice into hers, _but you just don’t seem like the Sinatra type._ And he’d ask her how she knew what a ‘Sinatra type’ was in the first place, and she’d explain that her friend from the soccer team’s mom was a lounge singer and had a real record player and would put Sinatra on all the time. Then Joel would pull her into his lap and mess up her hair and after a minor play-scuffle they’d settle back and he’d tell her stories, about the radio Tommy found one day when he was a kid, the one that only picked up two stations - one that aired a lot of baseball games and one that was mostly Frank Sinatra. They must have done exactly that at least a dozen times over, a well-worn routine of back and forth, just like a dozen other pointless little things they’d always done for no other reason than to do them.)

Lines float through Joel’s head in distorted clips, _because you’re mine, I walk the line,_ he tucks hair behind Ellie’s ear and wipes a tacky line of salt water from her cheek, _how far would I travel, to be where you are,_ a callous on his thumb catches on the edge of her eyebrow. He’s helping, or at least he’s not making things worse, so Joel just keeps going, unable to find anything else to do.

It seems like Ellie might be going to sleep. Her sobbing has died down now, the wracking strength of it petered off, and though she seems calmer Joel doesn’t think it’s necessarily because she’s any less upset. It figures to him that she’s simply run out of energy, completely worn herself through until all she can do is lay there on the mattress and breathe in deep, shuddering gasps.

“Go to sleep,” he tells her eventually, palm settled wide and flat over the blankets covering her trembling back. “It’s okay, you can rest now.” _It’s my turn,_ Joel thinks. _You did enough, you did way too much. It’s my turn now._

It’s obvious she’s still trying to keep her eyes open, struggling to do so, breaths uneven and strained. One of Ellie’s hands shifts like she might try to push herself upright, and Joel sees again in his mind's eye the way she’d been favoring one side, guarding her ribs unconsciously as she’d moved about the house while he’d been on involuntary bedrest.

“It’s just you and me,” Joel says without anything else to say or do, anything else he can offer her. “Ain’t nobody taking you away from me again, baby girl.” It slips out just like it had when he’d found Ellie, when he’d held her as she shook so hard he was worried she’d shatter to pieces right there in his arms. It hurts somehow more and less at once this time around.

“Promise?” It’s a shivering little question, scared and hurt and young.

“Promise,” Joel tells her even though that’s not fair, even though he can’t make promises like that. Even though he broke every one of them last time around. “Swear on my life.”

Much as he can’t make those kind of promises, it feels true to say. At least the last part does. Because the next person who tries to take Ellie away from Joel is going to have to kill him to do it, that much he knows without question.

“Go to sleep,” he tells her again, bringing his hand from her back to the back of her head, but it doesn’t matter. Ellie is already out, her head rolling to the side until it’s cradled by his palm, heavy and light at the same time.

There are a thousand more things Joel wants to say, things he may not get the chance or courage to say again. But even though she’s asleep and almost certainly can’t hear him, he can’t bring himself to say any of them. So he just sits there on the floor, healing wound aching in his gut and a heart he’d thought he’d cut out and thrown to the wolves a long time ago throbbing dully in his chest. He should get up. He should get up and check the bandaging and make sure he really hadn’t screwed things up when he’d carried her, he should pick the jugs of water up off the floor, he should do any of a dozen tiny maintenance tasks that build up on the day to day, but he doesn’t move an inch. 

Joel doesn’t do any of it. Despite how much it sucks to fold himself up on the floor, he couldn’t dream of moving. Not when he’s needed right where he is.


End file.
